Order of the Contebile
No one knows the true origin story of the Moleskine or the extent of the hardcover black book’s influence on the history of the twentieth century avant-garde. A young Ernest Hemingway famously preferred the petite book, noting there was “no friend as loyal.” At 4-years old, Picasso uttered his first word “piz, piz”, short for pencil. He was handed a pencil and a Moleskine and in his lifetime, he created 50,000 pieces of art. Inspired on a stroll one starry night, Vincent Van Gogh reached for his Moleskine to sketch his magnum opus. Though the ancient practice survived the Glorious Revolution, the Spanish Flu and the first World War, it was lost in the mid-1900s when the last Moleskine manufacturer went out of business. As the world ushered in the second World War, economic crises and standardized educational systems, the interest in preserving the companion and tool of the nomadic litterateur subsided.
